The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is defined in IETF RFC 2960. This description assumes the reader has familiarity with and understands RFC 2960. SCTP is also described in R. Stewart et al., “Stream Control Transmission Protocol” (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2001) (“Stewart et al.” herein).
SCTP can support of multi-homed network nodes, which are network elements such as routers and switches that can be reached using any of several network addresses. SCTP nodes and intermediate nodes in a network may be configured so that traffic from one node to another travels on physically different routed paths if different destination network addresses are used in a packet. In such a configuration, SCTP associations become tolerant against physical network failures.
In present practice, only a loss of connectivity will cause an SCTP implementation to change the destination network address of a destination node. Thus, the use of multi-homed nodes with SCTP associations is limited. Network path characteristics can change over the lifetime of an association, but when performance of a network path to a first destination of an address declines, presently there is no way to change the destination network address to a second address that may provide better performance.